Spent the afternoon on a super duper deep background (or whatever) meeting with top Treasury officials, including my favorite Treasury Secretary. That means I can report what they said, but no quotes and no attribution.
Anyway, first thoughts are that a big frustration with the discourse of members of this administration is that they tend to present their policies as if they were optimal given the constraints they face, constraints such as Congressional legislation. But they rarely express what would be optimal if they..didn't face such constraints. They rarely say "we want Congress to pass X, but they won't, so the best we can hope for is Y." They say, "maybe it could have been better, but Y was the best we could get done" suggesting that there is some better policy without actually clearly stating what it would be.
There doesn't seem to be much interest in finding ways to expand what the range of possibilities, by, for example, getting allies to fight for X.
